Facilities such as hospitals, assisted-living facilities (“ALF”), and nurseries cater to individuals that are dependent and in need of special care, such as children, elderly, and disabled people. These individuals often need to be constantly monitored and taken care of. Aside from monitoring occupants of a facility, it is also necessary to monitor events and carry out health and safety-related procedures inside the facility to ensure the well-being of facility residents or patients. In hospitals, it would also be very useful to monitor the status of various medical equipment and devices, in addition to monitoring the status of patients in each hospital room without having to rely on medical personnel to conduct those monitoring constantly. In a large hospital or hospice, ensuring consistent compliance and monitoring of the required and scheduled procedures could be challenging where there may be a large number of patients or residents that need to be tracked around the clock. An automated system for monitoring of those facilities and personnel's compliance with scheduled tasks could greatly enhance monitoring efficiency, reduce or prevent accidents, improve compliance, and reduce overall costs associated with the operation of those facilities. Other facilities that could benefit from the application of an automated monitoring system are warehouses, offices, stores, day care centers, parks, zoos, and schools.
Monitoring systems using imaging devices such as closed circuit televisions (“CCTVs”) are widely used for monitoring facilities. However, many of these monitoring systems are not automated and still require human intervention (e.g., someone has to watch the CCTV feed) to conduct the monitoring of a facility and its personnel. Hence, there exists a need for an automated system for monitoring residents, personnel, patients, occupants, actions, procedures, events, tasks, and objects in a facility room or area.
U.S. Pat. App. No. 2013/0314522 discloses a patient monitoring system that monitors a patient, the patient's activity, and at least one medical device and also discloses the use of a microphone to detect sounds. U.S. Pat. App. No. 2012/0075464 discloses a monitoring system to determine actions taking place inside a monitored area.
The present disclosure offers an improvement over the aforementioned prior art by providing an automated monitoring system and method that executes a corresponding action based on a determined procedure from detected and identified parameters and comparison with pre-stored data and parameters.